because you don’t know shit about what you’re cramming down your booze hole

So, I was pretty impressed last night, so I went looking for something in the same vein. I read a little bit about the 2006 vintage and decided I wanted to stick with it, so I headed out to Binny’s.

Boom! Headshot.

2006, Terrazas Reserva. 3,500 feet up in Mendoza, they are aging these grapes in 20% American oak barrels and 80% French oak (same as the Rutini). The result is almost as fabulous as last night. A nose that makes you want to drink the stuff before it opens up, and a color that makes you think you’re an MLD, because nothin’ is as thick as blood, yeah brah? The mouth on this stuff is like walking through a tar pit made of blackberries with blueberries sprinkled in. Seriously, the fruit is great, and the acid and tannins on the tongue are a little more than subtle. The finish is about 15 seconds. Short, but good. My tongue continues to be sapped by the tannins for up to a minute, but there is no residual flavor.

Overall, I think this is damn good Malbec at the $16 price point, and I would definitely get a 6 of this to hang on to for a while if I had a place with viable storage conditions.

So like, it’s Wednesday… time to get wasted, amirite? My roommate recently made a trip to Argentina, and since he knows booze is like crack for me, he was kind enough to return with a bottle of Malbec, wrapped in paper just for me.

“RUTINI”

That’s what it says on the label. Along with “2006″. Oh, and “MALBEC”. There’s more mexican on there but it’s worthless to you. Well, unless you want to know where it was bottled. Which you don’t care about. If you really want to know, it’s a city about 400 miles north and west of where my roommate was on his trip. Feel special because I used a poorly-zoomed google map and my fingers to figure that out for you.

This wine is boss. I’ve been disappointed by so many wines lately. Roughly the last 30 to 40 bottles I’ve had haven’t been exactly what I’ve thought they would be. Oh, they’ve been fine, but they aren’t the delicate blackberry that resonates on my palate, they aren’t the tobacco that sticks to my tongue, they aren’t the leathery fruit that fills my nose. And they CERTAINLY aren’t EVERYTHING THE COLOR SAYS THEY SHOULD BE. This baby is opaque. I haven’t had a wine like this since last spring. I’ve actually been so disappointed by everything I’ve had recently that I took one look at the color and said to myself “this will never be as good as it looks.” The color around the edges looks like the shore of a ruby ocean, with the shallows quickly dropping off into depths unknown. The vapors coming from the ocean were my first hint that this would be a good experience. They were laden with fruit–thick–viscous, even! Dare I say, there was a finish in the bouquet?

So I swirled, I swirled some more, and I finally tasted. Magic! Medium-full body! Good! Red and black fruit! I haven’t tasted it in so long (lies–I’ve been eating raspberries en masse for weeks)! Finish! It finishes like the Nebbiolo I’ve been convincing myself I should be trying in the summer. The tannins are sucking my tongue dry, but only after the fruit delicately fills my mouth–like a wave lapping the shore.

I wish I had a case of this stuff, because it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Oh and, as a sidebar, this is AFTER he checked his bag on over 13 hours of flying with this in it.

Legit, this is all I want to write about this wine, because I need to go drink it in tranquility/dancing and spilling it all over my naked body.

It seems only fair that my first post be a wine that I’ve never had before. Surely this won’t be a recipe for failure!

Hold on a minute, I have to go get the wine key.

PSYCH!

This 2006 Adelsheim Pinot Gris is a twist-top, which has become an industry standard for wines from New Zealand and other new(ish) world producers. Oregon, it seems, has been under its own guise since the early 1960s, and is more than content continuing to do things just how it prefers to do them.

Now, it could be because this wine was purchased on the “CLOSEOUT, ABSOLUTELY MUST GO!” shelf of the local liquor store that it, at first, had a nose of “I can’t believe it’s not butter” and cooked pear. However, with a little time and a few swirls, the faux-butter settled down and the true fruit began to come through. Being that this particular winery will induce malolactic fermentation in certain lots of wine that end up being used in the final blend, and an even smaller portion is actually aged in older (read: mostly neutral) oak barrels, the soft oak characteristics will be present, but not overbearing. After a few sips, the pear characteristic comes out of its shell, followed by a nice apple finish. The diacetyl aspects settle down a bit too, which means (thankfully) instead of pears cooked in Country Crock, you get a nice fresh fruit flavor of crisp pear and apple with just a touch of butterscotch which in its own way can be reminiscent of applesauce or even caramel apples.

All in all, this wine is one of the very few examples I have seen thusfar that shows a delicate (and in this writer’s view, appropriate) amount of oak in a new world white wine.

Perhaps when I win the lottery or start feeding greyhounds steroids in their Kibbles ‘n Bits, I will do a summary of Oregon Pinot Noirs.